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Inside the weird world of Wychwood Park

A look at the beauty and bickering going on at Wychwood Park, Toronto's unique private enclave.

Developer Tsur Moses and the home at 106 Wychwood that is nearing completion. It took years to get off the ground due to strict Wychwood Park requirements. (JIM RANKIN / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

By Jim RankinStaff Reporter

Fri., Dec. 21, 2012

The trees of Wychwood Park stand naked, the leaves bagged and gone. On Taddle Creek Pond, a sign warns of deep water and quicksand in warmer months, but come winter — a real one, mind you — out will come the sturdy steel and twine hockey nets that rest on the bank.

Kids, as they do any time of the year, roam freely, and in whatever house they wind up in at noon on a Saturday, it is understood lunch will be served.

No pro hockey to watch? No problem. Reruns of the ’72 Canada-Russia series are playing in one home. Please
do
drop over.

Bucolic postcards from a unique private enclave tucked in the heart of urban Toronto. Indeed, all would seem fine in Wychwood Park, at least to an outsider.

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But as usual, in a place where you
do
know all of your neighbours — and there are 60 households — who kick in private money to care for a private road and common land — there are the usual and occasional crises that, over the 121-year history of the park, tend to come to a full boil before something has to give.

Today, the trust deed that binds the place, drawn up long ago, is showing its age. It comes with no teeth to make folks pay up. It may not, in fact, even be tenable, depending who you ask. Trustees have had to go to court to force one resident who steadfastly, out of principle, refuses to pay for something he says brings him no benefit. A heritage document that sets out what one can and cannot do is also weak. There are suspicions over how a private levy is calculated and over who pays what.

In a place where everyone knows their neighbours’ business, yet these days communicates less eye to eye and more by cold email, how
do
you enforce neighbourliness? As the line from Jack Nicholson’s character in
Mars Attacks!
goes, why can’t we all just
get along
?

Neighbourliness.

That’s what this story is about, set in a stunningly beautiful pocket of forest and homes near Bathurst St. and Davenport Rd., which began as an artists’ enclave and is now home to CEOs, lawyers and architects — newer families with more money, more cars, more wants and less time to deal with the inherent weirdness of Wychwood Park life.

“
It’s pretty big,
eh, this house?” chuckles Marc Giacomelli, as he and Tikaani, his friendly Alaskan Malamute, pause at the nearly completed home that straddles a double lot at 106 Wychwood Park.

“I guess it will eventually fit in, when it’s green and there’s trees and stuff,” says Giacomelli, 62, one of three park trustees.

For now, 106 — a grey-brick design inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright — looks entirely out of place. Monster home comes to mind, although, at 4,500 square feet, it is not the largest in the park. However, in proportion to the lot frontage, and how it sits on the land, it is undeniably an oddball.

While it may not be a symbol of a sea change here — there are other examples of odd homes here — the story of 106 certainly illustrates the pattern of recurring flashpoint issues that dot the colourful history of the park.

In a place where a private trust deed, a provincial Heritage Conservation District designation and a city heritage bylaw set out rules, how did a home that screams suburbia come to be built here in the first place?

The answer, as usual, was a shotgun compromise, of sorts. More on this later.

Just inside
modest open gates, at the point where Wychwood and Tyrell Aves. meet and Wychwood Park begins, there is a plaque that delivers a brief history of the place.

In 1874, painter Marmaduke Matthews built the first house here with the intention of starting an artist colony, and named it after a forest in England. In 1891, he and another early resident created a plan for the area in the form of a four-page trust deed that set out the private enclave’s rules.

Included in the document is a method of calculating an annual private levy, based on lot size and exclusive of buildings, to be spent on maintaining the road and common land. New homes were to be built in the spirit of the English Arts and Crafts movement and blend in with the landscape of the park.

The city takes care of garbage and other services, but residents are responsible to this day for maintaining a meandering circular road, two gates, one of which fronts on Davenport and is only opened for heavy trucks doing work, a ravine area, tennis court and Taddle Creek Pond.

The pond, it should be noted, was artificially created by damming Taddle Creek, which bubbles up from a spring within the park. Surely, not for the sole reason of giving resident artists — and there were a few — something to paint, but that is how one story goes.

In 1907, the trust deed was replaced by a corporation. In 1915, an early controversy over who would pay what and how the levy was calculated led to a new rule that proved unenforceable. That led to the reinstatement of the trust deed that binds to this day, legal or not.

In 1958 came a ratepayers association to act as a buffer between park trustees and the community. There were legal opinions sought over the trust deed and the power of the trustees. There were periodic disputes over land and new development, including one in the ’80s over a developer’s plan to wedge six houses on a large lot. As usual a compromise resulted, and three new homes were built instead.

In 1985, the area became a Heritage Conservation District, which ushered in new rules about what could and could not be built. But to this day, the plan remains weak, to wit, the freshly built monstrosity that sits at No. 106.

Through the ’90s, the sorry state of the pond was a recurring crisis du jour. It was so shallow it ran the risk of becoming a swamp. Residents eventually ponied up $90,000 to have it dredged.

In the early 2000s, the Wychwood TTC Barns and what to do with them became another divisive issue.

But nothing compares to the mysterious rash of tire slashings that culminated in the
2008 suicide of Albert Fulton
, one of two unofficial park archivists, and nasty rumours and a defamation suit over who might be responsible.

It made the news. The private affairs of the private enclave became very public.

Neighbours were talking. About neighbours. To reporters.

Good neighbours who are neighbourly simply shall not do this, but if they must, please be civil.

Quick aside: Following a lovely 1994 Globe and Mail piece on the park by John Bentley Mays, in which one named resident remarked upon the total unsuitability for the area of another unnamed resident’s house — “terrible … too Bayview” — the deeply offended unnamed resident dropped a bomb of a letter on the named resident.

“Immediately I came to realize that to individuals with your views, (and I can only assume there are more of you out there), the reality of living in Wychwood Park for my wife and I differs drastically from the images portrayed by Mr. Mays, with your help,” reads part of a letter circulated widely in the park at the time.

“For we will never be able to live there in peace and contentment,” it continues, “without being aware that beneath the surface of an idyllic park-like setting lurk the negative, senseless and hurtful attitudes of narrow minded and miserable people like yourself.”

Both residents later moved away.

Albert Fulton, as it turned out, was also apparently under the illusion that all should be idyllic in the park. He was upset with cars being parked on the road and generally fond of the old ways. With wealthier people moving in, along came domestic helpers, more cars and regular home upgrading and renos. There was simply no place to park but on the road.

Fulton took it out on the tires.

After being charged criminally and outed in the media, Fulton, also the park’s Neigbourhood Watch captain, went missing. His body was recovered from Toronto Harbour.

That sad chapter speaks to what is inevitable in the park, and not necessarily a bad thing.

Change.

Over the years, homes did stay within families, but the park has gradually lost its old-name stock. It attracts eccentrics, professionals and academics. Marshall McLuhan lived here, and only recently did his family sell off the home at No. 3.

Today, the houses of Wychwood Park are home to some recognizable names. Bonnie Brooks, president of Hudson’s Bay Company. Joe Oliver, federal minister of natural resources. Journalist Libby Znaimer. Gary Clewley and Crown attorney Jennifer Lofft, a former trustee.

Lofft, 51, only the second female trustee in park history, resigned last year, along with a fellow trustee.

In a letter to the park, Lofft and Marvin Green lamented that the annual levy was under attack and there was no way to enforce payment, let alone coax out dough for special levies for major projects.

Things were degrading and in need of fixing. And a small minority was standing in the way of getting things done.

One improvement project would be the road. Such is the state of the asphalt road, Lofft and Green noted in their resignation letter, that a cab driver remarked that it reminded him of his home country.

“When asked where he was from, he said Afghanistan,” reads the letter.

“With over $110m of real estate in Wychwood Park we can only imagine what effect the degradation is having on the resale value of each and every home.”

The community, the outgoing trustees wrote, is being “held hostage to a super-minority who may for one reason or another be dissatisfied with what most thought was a sound community decision. This minority is now carrying the day, which is unjust.

“Furthermore there is a very long history of acrimony and dysfunction in Wychwood Park that inevitably results from the problems noted above. The history of bickering and resultant degradation of our environment is a predictable outcome of this no longer workable governance model . . . .

“Until there is a new governance model, we are doomed to re-live the failures of old.”

What’s going on? There are differing wants and needs and priorities, and a power imbalance rooted in who pays what.

Marc Giacomelli, perhaps best known by SCTV Network aficionados as a creative director and associate producer in the Bob and Doug days, was named as a replacement trustee.

Residents now have busier lives. There are younger families. More money. And it is becoming more and more difficult to be neighbourly, says Giacomelli, who along with wife Sarah (she’s in real estate and grew up in Wychwood) live in a lovely home built by artist George Reid.

When longtime park caretaker Peter Caddick, who resigned a year ago, died in late November, only 11 houses of the 60 in the park were represented at the funeral, according to one person present.

The service was less than a 10-minute walk from the park.

“There are more, newer people moving in, with more money, especially young couples who I guess are kind of in between ‘charming, idyllic, historical Wychwood Park’ and ‘can’t the road be fixed and what about my property values’ kind of attitude,” says Giacomelli, who has served as treasurer and is in his second stint as a trustee.

“I guess because it’s unique and it’s lovely and it’s got trees and a pond, it’s different . . . but I don’t think it’s different in the neighbour dynamic, other than it’s more personal.

“It’s like a village, a weird little village, so the agreements and disagreements get emphasized. The benefits and the negatives are emphasized because everybody knows everybody.”

Perhaps the only
Wychwood owner that still has family ties to an original owner is Gerald Owen, a Globe and Mail editorial writer who, along with his wife, inherited his father’s home on Alcina Ave. It backs onto Wychwood Park and is part of the area subject to provincial and municipal heritage rules.

Owen, 59, also happens to be at war with the Wychwood Park trustees over the trust deed.

While he believes in the heritage aspects of the neighbourhood and the philosophy behind it, he believes the trust deed has no merit. Five years ago he stopped paying annual levies, for which he argues he receives no benefit, since his home fronts onto a city-owned street. (A number of Alcina homes are part of the park.)

The trustees took him to small-claims court, where Owen lost. On appeal to divisional court, the ruling was upheld.

Unchallenged in either court, however, was whether the trust deed is binding on future homeowners. Or even legal. The trust deed is not registered on the title of his home and Owen believes it is a feudalistic arrangement — one he didn’t agree to.

Owen remains steadfast and refuses to pay the regular levy. In a subsequent small-claims case brought forward by the trustees, Owen will have a chance to make new arguments on what turns out to be an old issue.

Owen contends that his family, in paying the levy over the years, has been subsidizing benefits received by others.

In 1952, a legal opinion cast doubt on whether the trust had any legal hold on a strip of common frontage on Alcina Ave. and warned trustees not to make any claims of ownership on that land. In other words, do not rock the boat.

The trustees, argues Owen, have been winging it for more than a century.

“We have every reason to believe that a succession of trustees have been afraid of what some of the beneficiaries would say to the court in that event — some would simply want out,” Owen said in an email to the Star.

At the heart of it all are the fees, suspicions over who pays what, who wants what, and who benefits.

Over the years, others have not paid or withheld payment until the last moment because of various disagreements with the trust over spending and projects. Records indicate past lawsuits where the trust went after residents.

In rare cases of financial problems, payments were delayed or staggered and, if left unpaid, were recouped by placing liens on properties, the amounts owed realized when the property was sold.

Owen’s regular annual levy now stands at more than $3,000, which is high for the park. Only eight other properties pay more than $3,000.

While the trust will not disclose who pays how much in levies, for privacy reasons — which is odd, given that one can look up city tax information — the average levy for the coming fiscal year is $2,027. The highest levy is $8,423; the lowest, $729.

With growing park costs, levies jumped by 25 per cent from the previous year.

This is on top of city property taxes.

At the end of each year, the homeowners of Wychwood Park vote with their chequebooks. By the end of this past fiscal year, three residents, including Owen, had not paid.

Owen, it should be noted, is not part of the “super-minority” that led to the resignation of the trustees. But he does have supporters who wonder about the trust deed. A neighbour on Alcina offered a letter of support for the court battle, saying that the private tax is “unfairly and inappropriately levied.”

Owen says that when he first started asking questions at a general meeting in 2007, he was treated “rather disdainfully.”

“The whole thing needs to have a complete overhaul,” Owen said in an interview. “But we essentially just want out. The deed is illegal and trusts aren’t really allowed to go on indefinitely, unless they’re actual charitable trusts. It just doesn’t make sense for us to be part of this.”

Others agree that the trust deed needs improvement. Options include scrapping it in lieu of a condominium-like arrangement, or, just turning over everything to the city, with heritage rules in place to protect the area. And there are residents who are leaning that way.

The only way to deal with changes to the trust deed is to open it up in court, which is costly. The results could be unpredictable.

Tsur Moses
pads through the nearly finished interior of 106 Wychwood Park in rubber boots. His iPhone chirps constantly. A couple of workers do brickwork on the main entrance.

The soft-spoken, 39-year-old Israeli-born engineer and developer and a business partner bought the land in 2007 for $1.5 million, and in doing so sent a collective shudder through the park.

That the old ’50s bungalow that sat on one side of the lot would come down was almost a given. For starters, no one much liked the bungalow, although the garden, including a lovely rose garden, on the empty lot beside it, was pleasing to the eye.

“It was a given, as soon as Tsur Moses bought that property, that something big was going to happen because our very own heritage document identified the lot as one for potential development,” says former trustee Lofft.

Initially, Moses wanted to put two large houses on the double lot. The city and the Wychwood Park Heritage Advisory Committee stopped him cold. A revised plan for two smaller homes looked promising but not to the residents of Wychwood Park, who galvanized over this issue.

“It was an amazing thing in some ways because a lot of the residents really came together and pitched in and there’s actually an extraordinary amount of expertise here,” says Lofft. “There are lawyers and planners and architects and artists.”

Architect Paul Oberst, who drew up one of the homes, remembers showing off the drawings at a community open house at the Wychwood Barns.

“The councillor (Joe Mihevc) liked it, the staff liked it, people came to the open house and just said, ‘It’ll never happen.’ And it didn’t.

“We got completely slaughtered. The neighbourhood is very tight. They sort of go to the wall.”

For what it’s worth, Oberst says he fell in love with Wychwood Park at first sight. “This would be years and years ago, it was just like, ‘Holy crap, I can’t believe there is this right in the middle of the city,’ and, ‘Oh, what a lovely place to live.’ And (now) it’s like, ‘You couldn’t make me go there. It’s just too weird.’ ”

Their two-house plan thwarted, Moses and his business partner went to the Ontario Municipal Board, where, after years of back and forth on the property, hammered out a settlement with the Wychwood Park heritage committee. There would be one house and a plan that would not result in the total demolition of the existing house.

The park was adamant that a demolition precedent not be set.

So, although you’d never know it to look at it, encased in double-thick foundation walls are remnants of the original bungalow.

This particular compromise will hence be known as the “house at 106.”

The fight, while always civil, took its toll on everyone involved.

As for the house, people “hate it,” in the words of one resident.

“As much hard work that was done, it looks like a monster house,” says Giacomelli. “When you stand and look at it, it looks like one of those fake French chateaus that you can see in Forest Hill or the Bridle Path.”

Even the developer thinks it doesn’t fit the lot. It’s “too huge” and the two smaller houses, Moses thinks, would have blended in better.

Five years after he embarked on the project, Moses will soon walk away without making any money, he says. He sold his share of the property to his partner, who may or may not live in the house before selling. It could potentially be ready for listing in a month.

Greeting a reporter for a tour of the house, Moses begins with a sales pitch: “What can I tell you about lovely Wychwood Park? Wychwood Park, it’s the oasis in downtown or middle downtown Toronto. It’s a place, if you are a young CEO, you want to raise your children in a countryside feeling and be ten minutes from your office.

“And the secret of this place is that a lot of people don’t know it exists.”

And then this piece of advice for fellow developers:

“I recommend to everybody not to do it. It’s not worth the time. It’s too hard. The neighbours are very picky, and I understand them, because they really love the neighbourhood and they really care. They want to protect it like a mother protects a child. But they overprotect it.

“For a builder, it’s very hard to get it approved. And they want to be involved in all the details.”

Moses calls this house — boasting a home theatre room, library, walnut floors and soaring ceilings — his baby and predicts it might go for $5.5 million, which would be a record for Wychwood Park.

It appears to be well built, with fabulous views of the park and tennis court.

“Whoever buys it is lucky,” he says. “He’ll have a finished house and he won’t have to deal with the neighbours. Because somebody already did it for you.”

To recap:
In this beautiful weird neighbourhood, there’s been a legal bun fight over a dusty 121-year-old document, a developer managed to build a house no one wanted built, divisive issues continue to crop up, there are suspicions over money, and occasional unneighbourly conduct.

And people who continue to love living here for a host of reasons.

“It is without a doubt the best place in the city to live,” says Lofft, who loves being “surrounded by beauty and interesting discourse.

“The eclectic mix of people who live here don’t fit perfectly into any one category. It’s not the place for those seeking instant social status or recognition; it is the quiet secret of midtown, and it’s more of a village.”

She and her husband Gary Clewley, who bought into the park in 2000, have had the pleasure of watching their five children — aged12 to 20, including 14-year-old triplet daughters — grow up there.

“It still is an amazing place to bring up kids,” says Giacomelli, who raised three kids here. “The positives are your neighbours know your business. The neighbours know your kids. The kids can run around, go in the pond, skate on the pond, look for rabbits.

“So, the negatives of a village turn into a positive.”

In the wake of last year’s trustee resignations and obvious neighbourhood issues, there’s now a new approach to getting along, and it turns out to be a very old approach.

Go slow. Walk around and talk to people, just like the trustees of olden days, who were typically older and had a lot of time on their hands.

“They would walk around on a weekend or on an evening and talk to people and ask what’s going on,” says Giacomelli. “Tree fallen down? Is your street light out? Do you really want to put that colour of roof on your house?

“It was face-to-face and it was like elders in a village.

“It sounds like some kind of weird idyllic thing.”

In other words, you do want to be a good neighbour, don’t you?

Weird anywhere else, perhaps, but not in Wychwood Park.

“It’s a great positive experiment in urban living,” says Giacomelli. “You wonder why there aren’t more neighbourhoods actually like this.”

For pleasure and sport, the residents of Wychwood Park will now hope for a frozen Taddle Creek Pond and watch the new trees at 106 Wychwood grow — and, now that the monstrosity is built, speculate on just how much she might go for.

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